Vargo Edward L
Department of Entomology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
Insects. 2019 Feb 12;10(2):52. doi: 10.3390/insects10020052.
Termites are social insects that live in colonies headed by reproductive castes. The breeding system is defined by the number of reproductive individuals in a colony and the castes to which they belong. There is tremendous variation in the breeding system of termites both within and among species. The current state of our understanding of termite breeding systems is reviewed. Most termite colonies are founded by a primary (alate-derived) king and queen who mate and produce the other colony members. In some species, colonies continue throughout their life span as simple families headed by the original king and queen. In others, the primary king and queen are replaced by numerous neotenic (nymph- or worker-derived) reproductives, or less commonly primary reproductives, that are descendants of the original founding pair leading to inbreeding in the colony. In still others, colonies can have multiple unrelated reproductives due to either founding the colonies as groups or through colony fusion. More recently, parthenogenetic reproduction has shown to be important in some termite species and may be widespread. A major challenge in termite biology is to understand the ecological and evolutionary factors driving the variation in termite breeding systems.
白蚁是群居昆虫，生活在由生殖型等级主导的群体中。繁殖系统由群体中生殖个体的数量及其所属等级来定义。白蚁的繁殖系统在种内和种间都存在巨大差异。本文综述了我们目前对白蚁繁殖系统的理解现状。大多数白蚁群体由一对原始（有翅成虫衍生）的蚁王和蚁后建立，它们交配并繁衍出群体中的其他成员。在一些物种中，群体在其整个生命周期内都由最初的蚁王和蚁后领导，保持简单的家族形式。在其他物种中，原始蚁王和蚁后会被众多幼态持续型（若虫或工蚁衍生）的生殖个体取代，较少情况下会被原始生殖个体取代，这些生殖个体是最初建立群体的那对蚁王和蚁后的后代，导致群体内近亲繁殖。还有一些物种，群体可能有多个无亲缘关系的生殖个体，这要么是因为群体建立时就是多个个体，要么是通过群体融合。最近，孤雌生殖在一些白蚁物种中已被证明很重要，而且可能广泛存在。白蚁生物学中的一个主要挑战是理解驱动白蚁繁殖系统变异的生态和进化因素。
